Jan Veizer

Credentials

Background

Jan Veizer is an emeritus professor of Geology at the University of Ottawa (Emeritus since April 2004) where he held the NSERC/Noranda/CIAR Research Chair in Earth Systems. From 1992 to 2004 he also served as the Director of the 'Earth System Evolution Program' of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIAR).

Veizer retired from the Chair of Sedimentary and Isotope Geology at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany. [1]

Stance on Climate Change

“MANY people think the science of climate change is settled. It isn't. And the issue is not whether there has been an overall warming during the past century. There has, although it was not uniform and none was observed during the past decade. The geologic record provides us with abundant evidence for such perpetual natural climate variability, from icecaps reaching almost to the equator to none at all, even at the poles.” [2]

Key Quotes

“Empirical observations on all time scales point to celestial phenomena as the principal driver of climate, with greenhouse gases acting only as potential amplifiers.” [3]

“First, Veizer reluctantly told me the 'text' of the Nature study, that is, the above-quoted conclusion, represented a 'compromise' between the study’s disagreeing authors where Veizer’s side apparently did all the compromising for reasons that had little to do with the science.

While Veizer didn’t want to elaborate on the politics of the Nature study, he told me 'not to take the tone of the paper as the definitive last word.'

Veizer went on to say that the new Nature study has not refuted his original study. The new study, in fact, appears to have confirmed the original study with respect to its most important point that the historical sea surface temperature data indicate atmospheric carbon dioxide does not drive global temperature.”

January, 2003

Together with Nir J. Shaviv[2], an Israeli astrophysicist and climate change skeptic, Veizer published a paper in Geological Society of America suggesting a reduced influence of carbon dioxide to Climate Change as opposed to a more significant influence from cosmic rays.

Several German (Veizer has been working in Bochum as well) IPCC oriented climatologists reacted toward the first summary of the paper with a sharp press release[12] published by Potsdam Institute für Klimafolgenforschung (PIK) that denounced the paper as “useless,” “outdated” and questioned whether the researchers and their methods were reputable. [7]